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Wednesday, 9 November 2016

Who is to blame for President Trump?

The election of Donald Trump represents a howl of outrage from millions of people who have felt abandoned by the political system. There was no sense or strategy to it, it was just a gigantic "fuck you" to a political establishment who have spent the last four decades pandering to the interests of the super-rich and allowing the erosion of the American middle class and the annihilation of American industry.

The racists, misogynists, fascists and xenophobes obviously came out in force to back the most bigoted presidential candidate in modern times, but there's more to it than that. Of course the bigots in America won the greatest victory of their lives, but they clearly didn't achieve it on their own, there's simply not enough of them.

The smug mainstream media consensus is already being formed that the "uneducated white working class" are to blame for this result, but this particular blame-game ignores a number of other much more significant culprits.

The most obvious culprits to start with are the Republican party elite who allowed their own party to be hijacked by a bigoted and mentally unstable demagogue. A few notable exceptions refused to endorse Trump but the majority of Republican politicians decided that it was in their own self-interest to clamber onto the Trump bandwagon and cheerlead for him, despite knowing full well that he's the most dangerously unhinged candidate ever to run for President.

The problem with blaming the Republicans is that their recent history is stuffed full of terrifyingly unsuitable Presidential candidates. Richard Nixon is rightly remembered as the most dishonest President in history (until now at least). Ronald Reagan was a B movie actor who was clearly suffering dementia by his second term in office. Then there was George "Dubya" Bush who somehow managed to make Reagan look like a towering intellect in comparison. Then in 2012 there was Mitt Romney. Just imagine the insanity of thinking it's a good idea to put forward a ruthless vampire capitalist like Romney when the nation was still suffering the fallout of the global financial sector meltdown!

The problem with blaming the Republicans for selecting bizarre and terrifying presidential candidates is that it's like blaming the sun for setting at night or attempting to stop the tide from coming in by shouting at it. It's just what they do.

If we're looking for a particular voter demographic to blame for Trump, then there's a much more obvious one than the white working class scapegoats. The white evangelical Christians came out in force to back the least Christian presidential candidate the US has ever seen, and they're getting an astonishing free pass from the majority of the media elite for their hypocrisy. The exit polls suggest that Trump won the evangelical Christian vote by 81% - 16%. In the key swing state of Florida the margin was an even more emphatic 85% - 13%.Trump is a divisive, arrogant, intolerant, sexist, abusive, casino-building, multiple divorcee and sexual predator, but millions of so-called Christians flocked to the polls to give him the strongest evangelical endorsement of any presidential candidate in decades.

It's actually pretty easy to understand working class Americans sending a massive "fuck you" to the political establishment after the four decades of neglect they've suffered, but it's almost impossible to comprehend the sheer hypocrisy of a bunch of hard-core Christians flocking to the polls to vote for a deeply unchristian bigot like Donald Trump, especially when a significant number of evangelical ministers came out and warned them not to.

But then again blaming white evangelicals for their abject hypocrisy is as futile as blaming the Republican Party for putting forward yet another crackpot presidential candidate. White evangelicals flocking to the polls to vote Republican is as reliable as the Republicans picking terrifying presidential candidates for them to vote for.

In my view the most blameworthy people of all are the Democratic Party elitists who worked tirelessly to undermine Bernie Sanders and rig the Democratic primaries against him. These people deliberately crushed the Sanders revolution simply because they believed that it was Hillary Clinton's turn to be President.

The folly of derailing Bernie Sanders' unprecedented grass-roots democracy campaign in favour of appointing the most pro-establishment Wall Street friendly candidate imaginable is all too obvious now that Trump has won, but it was always a deeply risky gamble given the revolutionary mood that has been growing in global politics since the global financial sector insolvency crisis.

Incredibly the Democratic Party elitists decided to completely ignore this revolutionary mood and install their favoured Wall Street backed puppet candidate rather support the guy who was running an inspirational grass-roots anti-establishment campaign that was tapping into the public anger at a political system that was no longer seen to serve the interests of ordinary people.

We'll never know whether Bernie Sanders would have beaten Trump because the Democratic Party elitists colluded with Clinton to prevent the possibility. However we can still be reasonably confident that Sanders' anti-establishment grass-roots democracy campaign would have taken an awful lot more wind out of Trump's anti-establishment rhetoric than Hillary Clinton's insipid, uninspiring "more of the same", "be thankful for the crumbs you've got" campaign.

There's no point in blaming the bigots and racists (they were always going to vote for Trump). There's little point in blaming the Republicans for once again putting forward a lunatic Presidential candidates (that's just what they do). There's no point in blaming the white working class for saying a big "fuck you" to a political system that has callously neglected them for the last four decades. The most blameworthy people are clearly the out of touch Democratic Party elitists who deliberately colluded with Hillary Clinton to destroy their own anti-establishment candidate (who had much better and more believable anti-establishment credentials than the bigoted billionaire Trump).

It's bad enough that they destroyed their own anti-establishment candidate, but the decision to crush Sanders is even worse considering they did it in order to put forward a living embodiment of the despised political elite.

Everyone who supported the Sanders campaign will remember the disgustingly displays of smug sneering contempt from Clinton supporters as it became clear she was going to win the nomination. These arrogant and patronising displays of outright contempt towards Sanders' genuine grass-roots political revolution and everyone who supported it was what lost the Democrats an election they should have won as a landslide.

The Democratic Party elitists rigged their leadership contest in favour of their pro-establishment candidate and then they sneered at all those who wanted to change the system to make it fairer and more responsive to the needs of the people. By doing this they took away the opportunity for America to restructure itself in a coherent and democratic manner and left the masses with the appalling choice of their chosen "more of the same" candidate, or sending a massive and utterly reckless "fuck you" to the political establishment.

By creating such an appalling choice for the electorate the out-of-touch Democratic Party elitists ended up handing the keys to the White House to a terrifyingly unstable right-wing demagogue.

In hindsight can any of them honestly say that President Trump is a better outcome than the idea of President Sanders that terrified them so much that they rigged their own internal party democracy in order to prevent it?

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